Mired by a litany of petty scandals, and the perception that the ruling Tories had grown corrupt and stale, Wildrose maintained a lead in the polls throughout the most tumultuous campaign in recent memory.

If Ms. Smith wins, it will reflect a province reaching back to its traditional, conservative roots, a moral fibre at odds with the Red Tory values Ms. Redford represents, said Cliff Fryers, the Wildrose campaign chairman.

PC 57 seats (Elected in 5; leading in 52)Wildrose 21 seats (Elected in 0; leading in 21)NDP 4 seats (Elected in 1; leading in 3)Liberals 2 seats (Elected in 0; leading in 2)

Mr. Fryers said Ms. Redford is likely to lose because she alienated the province’s conservative wing after she won the leadership of the PC party in October.

Also, if the premier had called the election right after she was chosen to head the party, he said this would have been a very different campaign.

“We would have been fighting on her agenda instead of ours,” he said. “By the time we were five days into this campaign, people were not listening to her, they were already listening to us.”

This 28-day campaign has been called one of the meanest on record. However, Mr. Fryers said it has also been among the most modern ever seen in Alberta’s history.

“Wildrose reached out to everybody with a very definitive platform, and a communications strategy and tour and ads, everything was coordinated. You’ve never seen that before in Alberta,” he said.

The upstart Wildrose party cemented during the reign of former premier Ed Stelmach in 2008 as a response to the government’s meddling with oil royalties. Ms. Smith ascended to the leadership of the party a year later.

The fledgling party is expected to make historic gains in rural Alberta due to their criticism of Alberta Land Stewardship Act, which was created under the auspices of the Tories. The law sparked outrage in the countryside, turning the Wildrose into a de facto opposition party within a few short years.

The Party also has deep roots in the province’s conservative movement.

Both Ms. Smith and key members of her campaign hail from the same “Calgary School” that has influenced the Reform movement and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Whole sections of Wildrose’s platform have their genesis in the 2001 firewall letter signed by Mr. Harper when he was president of the National Citizens’ Coalition. University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan also signed the letter – he has run Ms. Smith’s campaign.

Part of that manifesto calls for the creation of a provincial police force, and of an Alberta Pension Plan, which would benefit the province’s relatively younger, more affluent workers who currently pay into the Canada Pension Plan. Ms. Smith has said her party would conduct a feasibility study on these ideas.

As well, she advocates re-thinking the country’s current equalization program as, she feels, provinces like Quebec receive federal funds to provide subsidized public services unheard of in other parts of Canada.

Analysts have suggested Ms. Smith’s leadership would usher in a more aggressive, perhaps even isolationist Alberta at a time when the province most needs the support of other provinces to build pipelines to expand its market for bitumen.

But her campaign chairman, Cliff Fryers, said these policies reflect an Alberta that would lead confederation under Ms. Smith.

“We’ve got major issues facing this country. We’ve got a massive among of economic change taking place, the decline of Ontario and the rise of the west. All of those things means we have to have a dialogue,” Mr. Fryers said. “It’s not about us being in it for us, it means that we have a position to assume in confederation and we have to do that responsibly and there’s no one better to do that than Danielle Smith.”

Ms. Redford, a human rights lawyer with a plethora of international experience, became the unlikely leader of the PC party last October. She took over from an unpopular Ed Stelmach, who stepped down amid caucus infighting and a spiraling budget deficit.

Since becoming premier, she has been dogged by her party’s record, which includes a long list of scandals, allegations and broken promises.

The most notorious of these was the “no-meet” committee, a pan-partisan group of MLAs who collected $1,000 per month despite not meeting since 2008. Ms. Redford told Tory caucus members who sat on the committee that they had to pay the money back in the second week of the campaign.

The Wildrose Party also faced a barrage of criticism. It was painted homophobic and racist after a series of “bozo” eruptions by some of their inexperienced candidates. One, pastor Allan Hunspurger wrote in his blog that gays should burn in a “lake of fire,” while another, Ron Leech, said he had an advantage as a white candidate in an ethnically diverse Calgary constituency.